Erica Verrillo has written seven books and published five. She doesn't know why anyone with an ounce of self-preservation would ever want to publish. But, if you insist on selling your soul to the devil, learn how to do it right: marketing, literary agents, book promotion, editing, pitching your book, how to get reviews, and ... most important of all ... everything she did wrong.
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Sunday, March 23, 2014

Bad Reviews of Classic 20th-Century Novels

I enjoy reading bad reviews of famous novels - almost as much
as I enjoy getting them. It comforts me to know that if a book of mine is called "lugubrious" I will be keeping company with Aldous Huxley. (Unlike Brave New World, not one of my books has been called "lugubrious," or even "nauseating," but this is probably due to an avoidance of polysyllabic adjectives on the part of contemporary reviewers.)

These books were
panned primarily because they broke new ground. Innovative writing is rarely
well received in the short run. However, in the long run, these books have stood the test of time, and are now considered classics.

Here are some truly harsh reviews of 20th-century classics assembled by Sean Hutchinson for Publisher's Weekly. If your book has the good fortune to be called "silly," know that you are right up there with Richard Wright.

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Really Harsh Early Reviews of 20 Classic 20th-Century Novels

By Sean Hutchinson

Ulysses – James Joyce

Joyce’s magnum opus
redefined literature and was a major event upon its release in 1922. Some
bought into its radical structure, but others didn’t—including fellow modernist
Virginia Woolf. In her diary she called Ulysses “an illiterate, underbred book it seems to
me: the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they
are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating ...
never did any book so bore me.”

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Cited by many as the
Great American Novel, Fitzgerald’s inimitable The Great Gatsby remains a staple
in classrooms and on bookshelves the world over. Critic and journalist H.L.
Mencken, however, called it “no more than a glorified anecdote,” and that
“it is certainly not to be put on the same shelf, with, say, This Side of
Paradise [Fitzgerald’s debut novel].” In her review for the New York Evening
World, critic Ruth Snyder said, “We are quite convinced after reading The Great
Gatsby that Mr. Fitzgerald is not one of the great American writers of to-day.”

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov’s novel about
a literature professor who becomes obsessed with a 12-year-old girl wasn’t
without controversy when it was published in 1958. Orville Prescott’s review in the New York Times listed two reasons why Lolita
“isn't worth any adult reader's attention.” “The first,” he said, “is that it
is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The
second is that it is repulsive.” Later in the same review, he called Nabokov’s
writing “highbrow pornography.”

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

The ritualistic and
drug-filled dystopian world created by writer Aldous Huxley may have been too
much for some when it was first published in 1931, but the New York Herald Tribune may
have missed the point of the book altogether when their review called Brave New
World “A lugubrious and heavy-handed piece of propaganda.”

Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

Heller’s satirical
novel about World War II is so popular that the phrase “Catch-22” has become a
ubiquitous modern idiom meaning a type of no-win situation. Heller was in a
no-win situation, according to critic Richard Stern, whose New York Times review called the book “an emotional
hodgepodge.” He added, “No mood is sustained long enough to register for more
than a chapter.”

Under the Volcano — Malcolm Lowry

Lowry’s novel—about
an alcoholic British consul in Mexico during the Day of the Dead celebration on
the eve of World War II—has both dazzled and frustrated readers since its debut
in 1947. The New Yorker only reviewed it in its “Briefly Noted” section,
saying, “for all [Lowry’s] earnestness he has succeeded only in writing a
rather good imitation of an important novel.”

To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf

The New York Evening
Post’s cleverly snide review of Woolf’s highly abstract Modernist masterpiece
managed to praise her and shoot her down all in the same sentence: “Her work is
poetry; it must be judged as poetry, and all the weaknesses of poetry are
inherent in it.”

An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser

This sprawling tale
of love and deceit's influence has been made into an opera, a musical, a radio
program, and more. When the novel was first published in 1925, the Boston
Evening Telegraph called its main character, Clyde Griffiths, “one of the most
despicable creations of humanity that ever emerged from a novelist’s brain,”
and called Dreiser “a fearsome manipulator of the English language” with a
style that “is offensively colloquial, commonplace and vulgar.

Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man won the
National
Book Award for Fiction in 1953, cementing its reputation as one of the most
important books about race and identity ever written. In its 1952 review,
however, the Atlantic
Monthly thought it suffered from “occasional overwriting, stretches of
fuzzy thinking, and a tendency to waver, confusingly, between realism and
surrealism.”

Native Son – Richard Wright

Richard Wright’s Native
Son is another classic American novel about the African American experience,
but the New Statesman and The Nation found the book to be “unimpressive
and silly, not even as much fun as a thriller."

Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow

Bellow’s uniquely comic and philosophical novel about an
American millionaire who unwittingly becomes the king of an African tribe was
the author's personal favorite. But it wasn’t a favorite for critic Reed Whittemore.
In his review for the New Republic, Whittemore posed this question to himself:
“The reviewer looks at the evidence and wonders if he should damn the author
and praise the book, or praise the author and damn the book. And is it
possible, somehow or other to praise or damn, both? He isn’t sure.”